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The next few years will see some interesting trends in the world of IT, if the latest predictions from technology analytics specialist Gartner are any indication. The company revealed its top predictions for IT enterprise users in 2013 and beyond on Oct. 24 during the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando. Notably, Gartner predicted that enterprises will want to wait for more stability before proceeding with mass deployment of Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system, with 90 percent of enterprises waiting until at least 2015.

Big data is also predicted to have a big impact on enterprises and the IT job market, with big data demand reaching 4.4 million jobs globally by 2014. However, only one-third of those jobs will be filled. The report noted an important aspect of the challenge in filling these jobs lies in the fact that enterprises need people with new skills, including data management, analytics and business expertise and nontraditional skills necessary for extracting the value of big data, in addition to artists and designers for data visualization.

"The priorities of CEOs must be dealt with by CIOs who exist in a still-turbulent economy and increasingly uncertain technology future," Gartner fellow and managing vice president Daryl Plummer said in a statement. "As consumerization takes hold and the nexus of forces drives CEOs to certain expectations, CIOs must still provide reliability, serviceability and availability of systems and services. Their priorities must span multiple areas. As the world of IT moves forward, it is finding that it must coordinate activities in a much wider scope than it once controlled, and as a result, a loss of control echoes through several predictions we are making."

The nexus of forces Plummer refers to represents the convergence of social media, cloud computing, mobile technology and the ubiquity of information—the underlying tissue that connects the three technologies. As the consumerization of IT, a result of the availability of excellent mobile and Web-connected devices, interfaces and applications with minimal learning curves, drives the use of these four realms, they are revolutionizing business and society, disrupting old business models and creating new leaders, a July Gartner report said.

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With traditional mobile phone players getting squeezed and unable to compete with Apple and Samsung at the high end and struggling to differentiate from aggressive new vendors, most notably Huawei and ZTE, which are using the same Android platform for their models, Chinese vendors have the opportunity to leverage their strong position in the domestic Chinese market for entry-level smartphones and expand to other regions. By the end of 2014, three of the top five mobile handset vendors will be Chinese, Gartner predicted.

The company also said it believes that enterprises will adopt approaches that will block or restrict access for mobile devices that are not compliant with corporate policies, as IT departments struggle to secure company networks and private data as the popularity of bring-your-own-device (BYOD) initiatives rise. Through 2014, employee-owned devices will be compromised by malware at more than double the rate of corporate-owned devices, the report said.

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